One act play competition the hardest form of theater, in my opinion. You basically pick a one act and perform it for and audience. No big deal right. Except the rules are rigorous and hard to get around depending no the one act that you have chosen. You have to preform in under 35 minutes. You have very little time to set up and take down. You also have very little Tim to see the light and sound booth tech.

The one act that I had helped with, as I am a tech or stag crew person, was “Cry of the Peacock” . This one act was incredibly dark and scary for younger audiences. It show the story of a girl only 9 years old and the abuse she faces.

For this play we had to do scratched on a Cali’s back. (She has a blog post on how we did the scratches and other theater related injuries.) We had monsters under a bed and fake food and medicine. The sets were insanely detailed at parts. It was written in the script we most likely had it on stage.

The only downfall, competition day. We all got up early made our way to the theater, loaded our trailer with our set pieces, and grabbed the costumes. Or so we thought. One of the actors forgot his entire costume and another forgot her watch. Luckily I had my watch and the actor called his mom and had a friends mom bring clothes from home. we had thought that all our problems were solved. Oh we were wrong.

One of the actors was going through the rules and found that we couldn’t have artificial noise makers on stage or in the audience. We all thought that meant we couldn’t have our speaker that plays monster whispers on stage. We all freaked out after having three other people read the rules. Our director, who was in a meeting about the competition at the time, came in and asked what was wrong. We then explained the rule and she told that was not the case.

After everything was then settled. It was time to go on. As they preformed we shaved a good amount of time off. We took down and moved to the comment section of the competition. This is where one of the judges gives you feed back, at my old school all the judges would be there and give feed back. So the judge gave us feed back and then we got to see the other performances if we wanted to. the judge loved it. Of course we went and watched as many as we could.

At the end of the performances it was time to find out our placings. We were all in our seats and some of us were shaking, me probably the most, as the third place was called. Not us. Then second place was called. Again not us. And lastly the most important place first and to our shock and sadness. Not us.

We were all really shocked and hurt that we didn’t place. Our director grabbed our packet with all the feedback from every judge and what they placed us as. We all huddled around our director as she read them with the assistant director. The judge that did our feedback placed us as second over all. The other two judges placed us last.

We were all heart broken. Some crying and some angrily packing our things. We all loaded sets and got on the bus. This is a theater trip it is usually never quiet. It was dead silence almost all the way home. The only time we talked was when the director was telling us how proud she was of us. She said it didn’t matter what place we had in competition because she knew that we were amazing and we did out best. Some of us don’t talk about one act competition and some of us do but with major anger.